Society had not developed antibodies against manipulative journalism.
If you read something on the internet today, the odds are good that the writing was produced to capture your attention.
‘attention economy’.
writing in the self-help or career-advice genres will have to simulate insightfulness in order to keep your attention.
Some ideas sound insightful because they are true. But not all true ideas sound insightful. A true idea that is commonly accepted can sound trite and obvious: we call those clichés.
Readers love stories—they’re far easier to read than argumentative prose.
Sometimes simple ideas can be dressed up to seem more legitimate than they really are.
It forced me to confront some things that I “knew” but didn't really internalise. And I would put that as another category of learning.
if you strip away the complicated words, the underlying argument appears ridiculous.
writers sound smarter on paper because the act of writing forces them to clarify their ideas.
Writers are often seen as smarter because good writers today are trained to optimise for sounding insightful.
if a belief is useful to you in achieving your goals, keep it. Otherwise, discard it.
mindset tweak is a change to your worldview that allows you to better perform at something you’re doing.
if you find that you possess a mindset that actively hinders you in achieving your goals, then you should immediately begin a search for a more useful mindset to replace it with.
Newport recommends seeing your chosen vocation as a craft that you can get better at. This ‘craftsman mindset’—as he put it—is more useful, because it allows you to build mastery. And the literature suggests that mastery leads to passion more often than the reverse.
debugging activity is indicative of broader programming ability. Or, to put this more accurately: a programmer with good debugging skills might not be a great programmer, but a programmer with bad debugging skills can never be a good one.
write down your principles for dealing with different situations, because similar situations tend to appear repeatedly over the course of your life.
Formalising your principles simplifies decision making. It also allows you to consider each principle explicitly, and to change them if they no longer appear as useful to achieving your goals as they used to.